"The State of Israel ... will ensure complete equality of social and political
rights of all its inhabitants irrespective of religion ... it will guarantee freedom
of religion and conscience." - May 1948)

Chief Rabbi Yosef says civilian courts are 'worse than gentiles'

Chief Rabbi Yosef rails against civil courts system

Chief Rabbi Yosef says civilian courts are 'worse than gentiles' instances,' litigating before them is akin to 'kicking the Torah' and former chief justice Aharon Barak, who criticized a bill seeking to endow rabbinical courts with powers of arbitration in financial disputes, was a mere 'broken shard' to be cast away.

We can always trust Israel’s Chief Rabbis to provide us with new evidence for why we must urgently do away with the Chief Rabbinate, which has no precedent in Jewish history and poses an ever-growing existential threat to the wellbeing of the Jewish and democratic State of Israel.

This time, we turn our attention to Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef's attack against former Supreme Court chief justice Aharon Barak in a speech Sunday before rabbinical courts' judges in which he claimed Barak should be treated as dismissively as a "broken shard" and added litigation in civil courts was a grievous religious offense.

Barak and his ideas should be combated, Rabbi Yosef said, much like the mainstream conservative strain of Judaism fought against reformist movements in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The chief rabbi added that he considered Israel's secular legal instances to be worse than "the gentiles' instances," before which Halakha forbids Jews from appearing, and quoted seniors rabbis who claimed in the past that anyone who does so was "kicking the Torah" and have called the situation in civilian courts "deplorable and shameful."

As outrageous as Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef's recent pronouncements are, we should be reminded that this is not an exceptional view, but rather an ongoing thread in the religious thinking of the ultra-Orthodox rabbinic and political leadership.

The Chief Rabbinate is, in essence, a saboteur attempting to undermine the civil judiciary and Israeli civil law, admonishing the Israeli rabbis to warn the public that it should not turn to civil courts, but only to rabbinic courts. There is little doubt that if the likes of Rabbi Yosef and Rabbi Amar and their political cronies were to gain further control over the State of Israel, per their vision of a Torah state, we would be far closer to the model of Iran and Saudi Arabia than to being among the family of Western democracies.

Political cynicism and horse trading fund the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's operations, while it and its political supporters undermine the very cornerstones of Israel's democracy, preaching with no compunction that Israelis should circumvent the civil courts and Knesset law. They aim to turn Israeli into a dark theocracy where women and secular citizens are not permitted to bear testimony in court. All matters would be dictated by the corrupt Chief Rabbinate, rather than according to the principles of democracy accepted throughout the civilized world.

It is not Judaism that is in conflict with democracy and modernity. Rather, it is this specific, archaic, rigid interpretation, advanced by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate itself, which characterizes the religious powers that have gained control over religious life in Israel, which exemplifies Israel’s clash of religion & state.